In this study, we develop a high-fidelity finite element (FE) analysis framework that enables multiphysics simulation of the human finger in contact with a surface that is providing tactile feedback. We aim to elucidate a variety of physical interactions that can occur at finger-surface interfaces, including contact, friction, vibration, and electrovibration. We also develop novel FE-based methods that will allow prediction of nonconventional features such as real finger-surface contact area and finger stickiness. We envision using the developed computational tools for efficient design and optimization of haptic devices by replacing expensive and lengthy experimental procedures with high-fidelity simulation.

Using a force-controlled robotic platform, we tested the human perception of positive and negative modulations in normal force during passive dynamic touch, which also induced a strong related change in the finger-surface lateral force. In a two-alternative forced-choice task, eleven participants had to detect brief variations in the normal force compared to a constant controlled pre-stimulation force of 1 N and report whether it had increased or decreased. The average 75% just noticeable difference (JND) was found to be around 0.25 N for detecting the peak change and 0.30 N for correctly reporting the increase or the decrease. Interestingly, the friction coefficient of a subject’s fingertip positively correlated with his or her performance at detecting the change and reporting its direction, which suggests that humans may use the lateral force as a sensory cue to perceive variations in the normal force.

In Proceedings of the IEEE World Haptics Conference, pages: 467-472, July 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract

A typical approach to creating realistic vibrotactile feedback is reducing 3D vibrations recorded by an accelerometer to 1D signals that can be played back on a haptic actuator, but some of the information is often lost in this dimensional reduction process. This paper describes seven representative algorithms and proposes four metrics based on the spectral match, the temporal match, and the average value and the variability of them across 3D rotations. These four performance metrics were applied to four texture recordings, and the method utilizing the discrete fourier transform (DFT) was found to be the best regardless of the sensing axis. We also recruited 16 participants to assess the perceptual similarity achieved by each algorithm in real time. We found the four metrics correlated well with the subjectively rated similarities for the six dimensional reduction algorithms, with the exception of taking the 3D vector magnitude, which was perceived to be good despite its low spectral and temporal match metrics.

In Proceedings of the IEEE World Haptics Conference (WHC), pages: 395-400, Tokyo, Japan, July 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Both vision and touch contribute to the perception of real surfaces. Although there have been many studies on the individual contributions of each sense, it is still unclear how each modality’s information is processed and integrated. To fill this gap, we investigated the similarity of visual and haptic perceptual spaces, as well as how well they each correlate with fingertip interaction metrics. Twenty participants interacted with ten different surfaces from the Penn Haptic Texture Toolkit by either looking at or touching them and judged their similarity in pairs. By analyzing the resulting similarity
ratings using multi-dimensional scaling (MDS), we found that surfaces are similarly organized within the three-dimensional perceptual spaces of both modalities. Also, between-participant correlations were significantly higher in the haptic condition. In a separate experiment, we obtained the contact forces and accelerations acting on one finger interacting with each surface in a controlled way. We analyzed the collected fingertip interaction data in both the time and frequency domains. Our results suggest that the three perceptual dimensions for each modality can be represented by roughness/smoothness, hardness/softness, and friction, and that these dimensions can be estimated by surface vibration power, tap spectral centroid, and kinetic friction coefficient, respectively.

During hugs, humans naturally provide and intuit subtle non-verbal cues that signify the strength and duration of an exchanged hug. Personal preferences for this close interaction may vary greatly between people; robots do not currently have the abilities to perceive or understand these preferences. This work-in-progress paper discusses designing, building, and testing a novel inflatable torso that can simultaneously soften a robot and act as a tactile sensor to enable more natural and responsive hugging. Using PVC vinyl, a microphone, and a barometric pressure sensor, we created a small test chamber to demonstrate a proof of concept for the full torso. While contacting the chamber in several ways common in hugs (pat, squeeze, scratch, and rub), we recorded data from the two sensors. The preliminary results suggest that the complementary haptic sensing channels allow us to detect coarse and fine contacts typically experienced during hugs, regardless of user hand placement.

Dysgraphia is a neurological disorder characterized by writing disabilities that affects between 7% and 15% of children. It presents itself in the form of unfinished letters, letter distortion, inconsistent letter size, letter collision, etc. Traditional therapeutic exercises require continuous assistance from teachers or occupational therapists. Autonomous partial or full haptic guidance can produce positive results, but children often become bored with the repetitive nature of such activities. Conversely, virtual rehabilitation with video games represents a new frontier for occupational therapy due to its highly motivational nature. Virtual reality (VR) adds an element of novelty and entertainment to therapy, thus motivating players to perform exercises more regularly. We propose leveraging the HTC VIVE Pro and the EXOS Wrist DK2 to create an immersive spellcasting “exergame” (exercise game) that helps motivate children with dysgraphia to improve writing fluency.

To understand the adhesive force that occurs when a finger pulls off of a smooth surface, we built an apparatus to measure the fingerpad’s moisture, normal force, and real contact area over time during interactions with a glass plate. We recorded a total of 450 trials (45 interactions by each of ten human subjects), capturing a wide range of values across the aforementioned variables. The experimental results showed that the pull-off force increases with larger finger contact area and faster detachment rate. Additionally, moisture generally increases the contact area of the finger, but too much moisture can restrict the increase in the pull-off force.

The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is a powerful architecture capable of representation learning and generative modeling. When it comes to learning interpretable (disentangled) representations, VAE and its variants show unparalleled performance.
However, the reasons for this are unclear, since a very particular alignment of the latent embedding is needed but the design of the VAE does not encourage it in any explicit way.
We address this matter and offer the following explanation: the diagonal approximation in the encoder together with the inherent stochasticity force local orthogonality of the decoder. The local behavior of promoting both reconstruction and orthogonality matches closely how the PCA embedding is chosen. Alongside providing an intuitive understanding, we justify the statement with full theoretical analysis as well as with experiments.

In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Glasgow, Scotland, May 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Creating haptic experiences often entails inventing, modifying, or selecting specialized hardware. However, experience designers are rarely engineers, and 30 years of haptic inventions are buried in a fragmented literature that describes devices mechanically rather than by potential purpose. We conceived of Haptipedia to unlock this trove of examples: Haptipedia presents a device corpus for exploration through metadata that matter to both device and experience designers. It is a taxonomy of device attributes that go beyond physical description to capture potential utility, applied to a growing database of 105 grounded force-feedback devices, and accessed through a public visualization that links utility to morphology. Haptipedia's design was driven by both systematic review of the haptic device literature and rich input from diverse haptic designers. We describe Haptipedia's reception (including hopes it will redefine device reporting standards) and our plans for its sustainability through community participation.

In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages: 5411-5417, Montreal, Canada, May 2019, Hyosang Lee and Kyungseo Park contributed equally to this publication (inproceedings)

Since the 1960s, technologists have worked to develop systems that facilitate independent
navigation by vision-impaired (VI) pedestrians. These devices vary in terms of conveyed information
and feedback modality. Unfortunately, many such prototypes never progress beyond laboratory
testing. Conversely, smartphone-based navigation systems for sighted pedestrians have grown in
robustness and capabilities, to the point of now being ubiquitous.
How can we leverage the success of sighted navigation technology, which is driven by a larger global
market, as a way to progress VI navigation systems? We believe one possibility is to make common
devices that benefit both VI and sighted individuals, by providing information in a way that does not
distract either user from their tasks or environment. To this end we have developed physical
interfaces that eschew visual, audio or vibratory feedback, instead relying on the natural human
ability to perceive the shape of a handheld object.

In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages: 3804-3810, Montreal, Canada, May 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Humans can form an impression of how a new object feels simply by touching its surfaces with the densely innervated skin of the fingertips. Many haptics researchers have recently been working to endow robots with similar levels of haptic intelligence, but these efforts almost always employ hand-crafted features, which are brittle, and concrete tasks, such as object recognition. We applied unsupervised feature learning methods, specifically K-SVD and Spatio-Temporal Hierarchical Matching Pursuit (ST-HMP), to rich multi-modal haptic data from a diverse dataset. We then tested the learned features on 19 more abstract binary classification tasks that center on haptic adjectives such as smooth and squishy. The learned features proved superior to traditional hand-crafted features by a large margin, almost doubling the average F1 score across all adjectives. Additionally, particular exploratory procedures (EPs) and sensor channels were found to support perception of certain haptic adjectives, underlining the need for diverse interactions and multi-modal haptic data.

Extended abstract presented as an Emerging Technology ePoster at the Annual Meeting of the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES), Baltimore, Maryland, USA, April 2019 (misc)Accepted

We live in an aging society; social-physical human-robot interaction has the potential to keep our elderly adults healthy by motivating them to exercise. After summarizing prior work, this paper proposes a tool that can be used to design exercise and therapy interactions to be performed by an upper-body humanoid robot. The interaction design tool comprises a teleoperation system that transmits the operator’s arm motions, head motions and facial expression along with an interface to monitor and assess the motion of the user interacting with the robot. We plan to use this platform to create dynamic and intuitive exercise interactions.

We present a novel intrinsically motivated agent that learns how to control the environment in the fastest possible manner by optimizing learning progress. It learns what can be controlled, how to allocate time and attention, and the relations between objects using surprise based motivation. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated in a synthetic as well as a robotic manipulation environment yielding considerably improved performance and smaller sample complexity. In a nutshell, our work combines several task-level planning agent structures (backtracking search on task graph, probabilistic road-maps, allocation of search efforts) with intrinsic motivation to achieve learning from scratch.

Haptipedia is an online taxonomy, database, and visualization that aims to accelerate ideation of new
haptic devices and interactions in human-computer interaction, virtual reality, haptics, and robotics.
The current version of Haptipedia (105 devices) was created through iterative design, data entry, and
evaluation by our team of experts. Next, we aim to greatly increase the number of devices and keep
Haptipedia updated by soliciting data entry and verification from haptics experts worldwide.

Our goal is to understand the principles of Perception, Action and Learning in autonomous systems that successfully interact with complex environments and to use this understanding to design future systems